Well their recommendation was right for me. In day-to-day life the 128 GB drive on my MacBook Air was just fine. I use it for apps and my (clearly not huge) Itunes library. So I know I'll be fine with 256 GB. When I travel for a while and want a largish video library with me, I have a Seagate GoFlex Slim drive - it's 750 GB and 7200 RPM and THIN. At home I have more terabytes of storage than I can count.

The bottom-of-the line CPU is faster than my desktop i7 by a wide margin. I expect it will handle all I can throw at it.

cool, exactly what I ordered. The upgrade to a 2.6 cpu with 512 GB SSD isn't worth it (IMO) when where SSD storage is concerned, 256 GB is way more than enough for myself (programming, light gaming). Media is all stored on externals anyway (my itunes library is barely 10 GB)

7200 rpm hdd is faster than the mbp's top of the line ssd when used as a media archive? Just not true, I'd like to see him explain that.

Also, you don't need anything bigger than 256gb because you can use cloud services like dropbox? This guy apparently has never used dropbox, it syncs your files to the local drive so no space savings there.

16GB of ram is way overkill. 95% of people probably wouldn't even notice the difference.

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That's true. But considering it's a $2200 purchase and most buyers will likely want to keep this computer for at least 2+ years. You might as well upgrade to the 16gb to insure you have sufficient speed into future as other laptops and software are upgrade. Software is getting more and more complex eating up more of your ram. So might as well max out because you'll be stuck with the 8gb.

I have 9 gigs of ram in my computer and I have never swapped, once, in four and a half years. I've run VMWare windows 7 and Parallels Fusion, and I. Have. Never. Swapped.

I really don't think you need the RAM upgrade. But I understand that this is not a popular opinion.

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Thats the thing though, you'vehave 9 (strange number btw) gigs of ram since 2007(8?). No one would have ever thought to put 9 gigs of ram in back then. Now you have to consider 4.5 years in the future. 16 is probably the way to go.

I have 9 gigs of ram in my computer and I have never swapped, once, in four and a half years. I've run VMWare windows 7 and Parallels Fusion, and I. Have. Never. Swapped.

I really don't think you need the RAM upgrade. But I understand that this is not a popular opinion.

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4.5 years ago 9GB of ram was a ALOT. You're forgetting that most of us buying this will be keeping it for up to 4-5 years until the next refresh. By then 16GB will be standard so you might as well plan for the future because you CANT upgrade!!

And the RAM? Well, it's soldered on there, so you've got to decide now. And $200 for the bump from 8GB to 16 isn't bad at all. Memory is one of the things that will give you actual, tangible benefits day-to-day.

While the article isn't the best-written I've ever seen, it basically gets all the main points right.

I ordered the 2.3/256/16 model myself - processor is plenty, SSD is accompanied by a 1TB external, and upping to 16GB futureproofs it.

And $200 for an extra 8GB, while painful when you look at how cheap buying 16GB and putting it into your old MBP is, is pretty good as far as Apple prices are concerned. Yeah, I don't like letting Apple stick it to me like this, but going along with Apple's being a control freak is part of the buy-in price of Apple computers, both software and hardware.

- went with the slightly *faster processor 2.6 CPU
yes needed to pay $600 more but CPU goes from 2.3 to 2.6*
AND THE SSD goes from 256 gb SSD to 512 gb.

The bump in SSD alone is worth about $600 or $700 IF it could be bought aftermarket from OWC. No telling when the aftermarket SSD upgrade might be available, but likely 2 months or more. *Besides, with the retina display and all this new technology tightly packaged in a whole new configuration, I don't want any deniability on any warranty work or AppleCare claims due to third party SSD. Nothing wrong with OWC as a company, just don't want to risk it and why wait a few months to buy the SSD I want from aftermarket when I can get it right now from Apple at a very reasonable price?

- maxed out with the16 gb RAM ($200 more but can't upgrade later)

- Couldn't justify spending $250 for the small bump in CPU from 2.6 to 2.7
- Couldn't justify spending $500 more for the bump in SSD from 512 to 768gb

Makes sense to me. an extra $600 for a cpu bump and extra 256GB isnt really worth while for me. As for the extra 8GB of ram, while pricey its not something I can upgrade down the line so might as well. In the end, will probably just going to end up spending the money saved on Applecare.

- went with the slightly *faster processor 2.6 CPU
yes needed to pay $600 more but CPU goes from 2.3 to 2.6*
AND THE SSD goes from 256 gb SSD to 512 gb.

The bump in SSD alone is worth about $600 or $700 IF it could be bought aftermarket from OWC. No telling when the aftermarket SSD upgrade might be available, but likely 2 months or more. *Besides, with the retina display and all this new technology tightly packaged in a whole new configuration, I don't want any deniability on any warranty work or AppleCare claims due to third party SSD. Nothing wrong with OWC as a company, just don't want to risk it and why wait a few months to buy the SSD I want from aftermarket when I can get it right now from Apple at a very reasonable price?

- maxed out with the16 gb RAM ($200 more but can't upgrade later)

- Couldn't justify spending $250 for the small bump in CPU from 2.6 to 2.7
- Couldn't justify spending $500 more for the bump in SSD from 512 to 768gb

Your mileage may vary, but I really think this hits the sweet spot, and may turn out to be one of the most common BTO configurations!

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Nice, this is the exact configuration I've been contemplating myself. I'd love to expand the SSD, but the price of doing so is rather huge, I think I'd just get a nice, big, high speed external HD to dump files on.

Here's how I see it:
In 2008, 2gb was standard, 4gb was comfortable, and 6-8 was a lot (and cost several hundred dollars). I got by with 4 for around a year, but I was doing some VM work while running Matlab and Firefox, all of which hog RAM. I was waiting for swap too much, so I upgraded to 6GB when a 4GB module for my computer dropped to around $150, and I've been very happy with it until the past year. Now I don't use VMWare as much, but Snow Leopard and Firefox hog much more RAM than they used to (and leak like sieves), and if I'm running too many things at once sometimes I hit swap. 8GB would be comfortable right now for what I do.

4 years down the road, I can anticipate 8gb no longer being comfortable. I can't imagine what could possibly use so much RAM (and I don't even understand what uses so much RAM right now... Why does Firefox need 500MB to 1GB(!)?), but given the trend that's been continuing since I first owned a computer I can say it's very likely that in four years we will be using a lot more memory than we do now. Maybe youtube will start allowing 4K uploads so Flash can max out 16 CPU cores, or maybe Apple will introduce a new Cochlea® iTunes music format that takes more RAM to decode, or maybe once more third party apps are updated to be retina compatible they will start using four times as much RAM as they do now.

I'm debating the 16gb but everyone is talking about how it'll be the norm a few years from now but who am I kidding I buy a new computer every 1-2 years I've owned every MacBook air to date and a few others in between. My iMac has 8 and it's great even though leggy at times it doesn't have an ssd or an ivy bridge so I guess I'll just pick up whatever model I find.

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